Daredevil, Season 1, Episode 11: The Path of the Righteous
We begin the endgame with this episode, one of the most crucial parts being the fact that Matt recruits Melvin Potter (a.k.a. Gladiator) and commissions what is obviously his Daredevil costume from him. I still question the creative choice of having him run around with a stupid bandanna covering the upper half of his face and dressing in all black, resulting in one of the stupidest-looking superhero costumes ever. But hey.
Anyway, future costume aside, a good chunk of this episode focuses on James Wesley, the Kingpin's right-hand man and BFF. And the show definitely portrays their odd friendship really well. We have Wilson Fisk, who never opens up to anyone other than his woman, show an extremely vulnerable side only to his friend Wesley, and manages to struggle out a thank you. We have Wesley being a staunch ally as he tries to handle everything from Leland Owsley questioning Kingpin's grief and leadership, from trying to quietly handle the problem of someone peeking into Fisk's mother -- something that he knows will distress his friend, and generally the interactions between the two. It really builds up to the friendship we've seen between the two over the episodes, with Fisk admitting to Vanessa that Wesley is his only friend, Wesley having the initiative to bring in Vanessa during the Kingpin-centric episode 7 to help Fisk deal with his problems, Fisk only trusting Wesley to arrange for Vanessa's exit...
And Karen's yolo-mode investigation really comes back to bite her in the ass as Ben Urich is pretty blatantly repulsed by her taking advantage of Urich's reluctance to continue for the sake of his wife and instead using his problem with his wife to investigate a nursing house. And, well, Fisk's mother manages to, through the delirium, call Fisk -- a call picked up by Wesley, causing him to investigate in Fisk's stead.
We get a pretty awesome confrontation between Karen and Wesley. Now the smart move for Karen would be to accept Wesley's deal and then work out a way to bring Wesley down, but, well we know Karen and we know she is stubborn. After being sidelined in an uninteresting "I want to get this on paper and hang the consequences" sideplot, it's nice to see both reality and relevance catch up to Karen. Wesley does his awesome master-manipulator thing and tries to give a sales pitch to Karen, offering her a job... before getting interrupted by a phone call, allowing Karen to grab his gun. There's a tense bit of bluffing going on and then Karen blows like a half-dozen holes through Wesley's chest and stomach, and we see the shots actually go through the chair he's sitting on, so any hopes that the bulletproof-vest foreshadowings we had this episode are all dashed to dust. I was totally HOLY SHIT when this moment happened, equal parts enraged because I really liked Wesley, but at the same time impressed for both Karen's figurative balls and the show writers for this unexpected twist.
I definitely did not see that coming, and I expected James Wesley to hang around in a long-time term. If anything, I expected the likes of Karen, Father Lantom or Ben Urich to bite the dust before Wesley, a 'sacrificial lamb' to motivate the heroes, but I guess it works both ways here, with the extremely likable James Wesley being shot dead to motivate the Kingpin. And it's honestly not that much of an ass-pull. I mean, yes, Karen being good with a gun as part of her mysterious past™ may be somewhat cliched, but it's not unbelievable since, y'know, all she did was steal the gun and shoot Wesley dead. And the irony that for all the internal turmoil that Matt had over whether he had to kill Wilson Fisk, it is Karen who actually draws first kill for the side of the angels.
And after the nice foreshadowing that either Ben or Karen would be the one to bite the bullet... I mean, they are both important characters in the comics, so I didn't expect them to die in the first season, but the threat is still there. With Wesley going out for blood, we have no idea who he's going to come for and the little death flag of them reconciling over Karen's dick move (giving Ben false hope for his wife) you'd think one of them would bite the dust soon. Or at least have one of them be turned into the damsel/dude in distress. WRONG! Poor Wesley.
Speaking of which, I totally agree with Ben Urich for shutting down Karen's frantic plans to expose Wilson Fisk's backstory to the world, which doesn't really prove anything and if anything would help to humanize Wilson Fisk to the public eye thanks to the tragic evil motherbeating father backstory. It's pretty well done, and I'm glad that logic doesn't take a nosedive since, well, what Karen is proposing is reckless and relatively dumb.
And Wilson Fisk was... definitely humanized this episode. From his interactions with his one friend Wesley, to basically being emotionally broken at the prospect of losing the love of his life, to the little speech about not really understanding religion and promising hell to whoever poisoned Vanessa... and the fact that you just know Wesley's death on top of all of that is going to utterly break Wilson Fisk.
Besides the big Karen-Wesley and Fisk moments, Matt himself also gets some more humanizing moments. After a pretty short fight with Melvin Potter, he discovers that Potter is... well, he has an ambiguous somewhat-childlike mentality, and he's being kept in check by Fisk by threatening his friend Betsy. Matt commissions a bulletproof costume, one that will also serve as a symbol. Finally. Matt also gets a bit of a closure with Claire, who shows up for a bit, shutting down their honestly under-developed romance and parting as friends. There's also a bit of a nice conversation here and there for Matt, but nothing as memorable as the character moments that Fisk, Karen and Wesley has.
Leland Owlsley is also a treat, being the voice of doubt and the voice of work for Kingpin's side, and the amount of noise he's making and the amount of complaining about how 'they almost got me', as well the intentionally vague comments about whether the Japanese or Chinese factions are behind it, makes him a likely candidate for the poisoning, though honestly it could go either way. Fisk himself is suspicious of Leland, since he tells Wesley to move Vanessa and now Leland.
Less of a treat is the aftermath of last episode, with Karen being confused as to what happened between Foggy and Matt, the cold war between the two, and Foggy randomly shacking up with his ex, Queen Bitch Marci, quite randomly sinking the Foggy-Karen ship. It's odd storytelling on that last bit, though I can't say I'm entirely unhappy that the undoubtedly exhausting love triangle bullshit is shot down as well.
A pretty great episode! It's not something commonly said for an episode where one of my favourite characters die, but it's a great exit for Wesley, and while I don't like Karen that much it's definitely a well-scripted, well-done scene, the perfect example of a shocking, plot-relevant death. Good job! With two episodes to go, it definitely raised the stakes, priming Wilson Fisk to go on a massive rampage against the good guys.
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